Firstly, congratulations to Rishi Sunak, the latest British PM and a man of the Hindu religion and Indian heritage. He replaces the third British female PM. Interestingly, the Tories have managed to elect an Indian Hindu, three women and one Jewish PM to zip by the labour side. At least Tony Blair was a practicing Catholic but no women or people of colour yet from British Labour. Mr Sunak faces a tough time, and if he can get back to reliable baseload power (especially nuclear) thus helping curb energy costs and only spend money on the one area he needs to increase expenditure in, defence, then he will increase his very slim chance of re-election. The UK needs to increase defence expenditure to about 3% of GDP from 2.2% to help fight or deter further Russian aggression.
In Australia, Treasurer Chalmers and the ACT’s very own Katy Gallagher have brought down their first Budget. Whatever it did or didn’t do, it failed in two very important areas.
The first one was cutting nation building projects in rural Australia, especially canning the construction of two new dams.
New dams not only promote water security in regional areas and build the local and national economy, they help control floods and obviously store water intakes of heavy rain to help drought-proof this country. They help harness water, a precious resource. Jon Stanhope did that here with the enlarged Cotter Dam.
The other area was defence. The budget statement dropped defence expenditure from 1.98% of GDP to 1.97%; not a huge change but not a good one, especially as we will need to raise defence expenditure to about 3% of GDP very soon to have any chance of providing an adequate defence of our country and way of life in an increasingly hostile world. Memo to Messrs Albanese, Morales and Chalmers and Ms Gallagher: you can have the greatest social welfare system and NDIS system in the world but they are pointless if you can’t defend yourself.
A lot of money was allocated to renewables, which we still can’t store energy from.
I will leave the last word to Chairman/President Xi, recently elected for a record third term by his cronies in the CCP.
In kicking off his party’s congress, President Xi said his government would “work actively and prudently towards the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality. Based on China’s energy and resource endowments, we will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way, in line with the principle of ‘getting the new before discarding the old’.” Sage words indeed; if only the current Australian government was as sensible as its Chinese counterpart when it comes to energy policy.
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Canberra Daily.
